A more expressive vocabulary for programming

map and friends are more precise, sophisticated ways to talk about consistent patterns in data manipulation. Using them over for is analogous to using the word “cake” instead of “the kind of food that you make by whipping egg whites and maybe adding sugar”.

Interestingly, you can eventually add new layers of category on top of established layers: just like saying that butter cakes constitute a specific family of cakes, one could say that pluck is a specialization of map.